The Shooter watched President Obama announcing the raid on TV while he was looking at the body of Osama bin Laden.

The Shooter watched President Obama announcing the raid on TV while he was looking at the body of Osama bin Laden.

Photo: CIR

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The Shooter said, "I'm watching (Obama), looking at the body (bin Laden), looking at the President, eating a sausage, egg, cheese and extra bacon sandwich thinking: "How the f-- did I get here?"

The Shooter said, "I'm watching (Obama), looking at the body (bin Laden), looking at the President, eating a sausage, egg, cheese and extra bacon sandwich thinking: "How the f-- did I get here?"

Photo: CIR

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A year after bin Laden's death, CNN asked viewers where they were at that moment he died. The Shooter replied: "Of course. I remember exactly where I was. I was in his bedroom, looking down at his body."

A year after bin Laden's death, CNN asked viewers where they were at that moment he died. The Shooter replied: "Of course. I remember exactly where I was. I was in his bedroom, looking down at his body."

Photo: CIR

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After a post-Osama-raid deployment to Afghanistan, The Shooter decided the high-risk career was no longer for him.

After a post-Osama-raid deployment to Afghanistan, The Shooter decided the high-risk career was no longer for him.

Friends and family of victims gather at the North Pool of the 9/11 Memorial during the 10th anniversary ceremonies of September 11 at the World Trade Center site, September 11, 2011 in New York City.

Friends and family of victims gather at the North Pool of the 9/11 Memorial during the 10th anniversary ceremonies of September 11 at the World Trade Center site, September 11, 2011 in New York City.

Photo: Pool, Getty

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Part III: No landing pad in civilian life for the Shooter

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Editor's note: For the first time, the Navy SEAL who fired the three shots that killed Osama Bin Laden tells the story of the May 2, 2011, raid on his residential compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The Shooter requested and was given anonymity for several reasons, including fears for his family's safety.

Phil Bronstein is the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and currently serves as executive chairman of the Center for Investigative Reporting. This is the last of three excerpts from a longer story Bronstein wrote for Esquire, a Hearst magazine, in cooperation with CIR. Part I is here; part II is here. It can be read in its entirety at esquire.com.

The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care.

It was a mild spring day, April 2012, and our small group, including a few of his friends and family, was shielded from the sun by the patchwork shadows of maple trees. But the Shooter was sweating as he talked about his uncertain future, his plans to leave the Navy and SEAL Team 6.

He stood up several times with an apologetic gripe about the heat, leaving a perspiration stain on the seat-back cushion. He paced.

In my yard, the Shooter told his story about joining the Navy at nineteen, after a girl broke his heart. To escape, he almost by accident found himself in a Navy recruiter's office. "He asked me what I was going to do with my life. I told him I wanted to be a sniper.

"He said, 'Hey, we have snipers.'

"I said, 'Seriously, dude. You do not have snipers in the Navy.' But he brought me into his office and it was a pretty sweet deal. I signed up on a whim."

"That's the reason Al Qaeda has been decimated," he joked, "because she broke my f--ing heart."

I would come to know about the Shooter's hundreds of combat missions, his 12 long-term SEAL-team deployments, his 30-plus kills of enemy combatants, often eyeball to eyeball. And we would talk for hours about the mission to get bin Laden and about how, over the celebrated corpse in front of them on a tarp in a hangar in Jalalabad, he had given the magazine from his rifle with all but three lethally spent bullets left in it to the female CIA analyst whose dogged intel work and intuition led the fighters into that night.

When I was first around him, as he talked I would always try to imagine the Shooter geared up and a foot away from bin Laden, whose life ended in the next moment with three shots to the center of his forehead.

Bin Laden was, after all, the man former CIA director Leon Panetta called "the most infamous terrorist in our time," who devoured inordinate amounts of our collective cultural imagery for more than a decade. The number-one celebrity of evil. And the man in my backyard blew his lights out.

Enough people connected to the SEALs and the bin Laden mission have confirmed for me that the Shooter was the "number two" behind the raid's point man going up the stairs to bin Laden's third-floor residence, and that he is the one who rolled through the bedroom door solo and confronted the surprisingly tall terrorist pushing his youngest wife, Amal, in front of him through the pitch-black room. The Shooter had to raise his gun higher than he expected.

The point man is the only one besides the Shooter who could verify the kill shots firsthand, and he did just that to another SEAL I spoke with. But even the point man was not in the room then, having tackled two women into the hallway, a crucial and heroic decision given that everyone living in the house was presumed to be wearing a suicide vest.

But a series of confidential conversations, detailed descriptions of mission debriefs, and other evidence make it clear: The Shooter's is the most definitive account of those crucial few seconds, and his account, corroborated by multiple sources, establishes him as the last man to see Osama bin Laden alive.

What is much harder to understand is that a man with hundreds of successful war missions, one of the most decorated combat veterans of our age, who capped his career by terminating bin Laden, has no landing pad in civilian life.

Unlike former SEAL Team 6 member Matt Bissonnette (No Easy Day), SEALs do not rush to write books or step forward publicly, because that violates the code of the "quiet professional." Someone suggested they might sell customized sunglasses and other accessories special operators often invent and use in the field. It strains credulity that for a commando team leader who never got a single one of his men hurt on a mission, sunglasses would be his best option. And it's a simple truth that those who have been most exposed to harrowing danger now find themselves adrift, trying desperately to adjust, often scrambling just to make ends meet.

At the time, the Shooter's uncle had reached out to an executive at Electronic Arts, hoping that the company might need help with video-game scenarios once the Shooter retired. But the uncle cannot mention his nephew's distinguishing feature as the one who put down bin Laden.

Secrecy is a thick blanket over our Special Forces that inelegantly covers them, technically forever. The 23 SEALs who flew into Pakistan that night were directed by their command the day they got back stateside about acting and speaking as though it had never happened.

"Right now we are pretty stacked with consultants," the video-game man responded. "Thirty active and recently retired guys" for one game: Medal of Honor Warfighter.

Despite his foggy future, his past is deeply impressive. This is a man who is very pleased about his record of service to his country and has earned the respect of his peers.

"He's taken monumental risks," says the Shooter's dad, struggling to contain the frustration that roughs the edges of his deep pride in his son. "But he's unable to reap any reward."

It's not that there isn't one. The U. S. government put a $25 million bounty on bin Laden that no one is likely to collect. Certainly not the SEALs who went on the mission nor the support and intelligence experts who helped make it all possible. Technology is the key to success in this case more than people, Washington officials have said.

The Shooter doesn't care about that. "I'm not religious, but I always felt I was put on the earth to do something specific. After that mission, I knew what it was."

Others also knew, from the commander-in-chief on down. The bin Laden shooting was a staple of presidential-campaign brags. One big-budget movie, several books, and a whole drawerful of documentaries and TV films have fortified the brave images of the Shooter and his ST6 Red Squadron members.

There is commerce attached to the mission, and people are capitalizing. Just not the triggerman. While others collect, he is cautious and careful not to dishonor anyone. His manners come at his own expense.

"No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job," Barack Obama said last Veterans' Day, "or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home."

But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after 16 years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:

No pension, no health care (aside from a limited VA benefit, which provides nothing for his wife and kids), and no protection for himself or his family.

Since Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon's butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door, if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.

Then there is the "bolt" bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.

"Personally," his wife told me recently, "I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago," when her husband joined ST6.

When the White House identified SEAL Team 6 as those responsible, camera crews swarmed into their Virginia Beach neighborhood, taking shots of the SEALs' homes.

The Shooter cautioned his older child not to mention the Al Qaeda leader's name ever again "to anybody. It's a bad name, a curse name." His kid started referring to him instead as "Poopyface." It's a story he told affectionately on that April afternoon visit to my home.

He loves his kids and tears up only when he talks about saying goodbye to them before each and every deployment. "It's so much easier when they're asleep," he says, "and I can just kiss them, wondering if this is the last time." He's thrilled to show video of his oldest in kick-boxing class. And he calls his wife "the perfect mother."

In fact, the couple is officially separated, a common occurrence in ST6. SEAL marriages can be perilous. Husbands and fathers have been mostly away from their families since 9/11. But the Shooter and his wife continue to share a house on very friendly, even loving terms, largely to save money.

"We're actually looking into changing my name," the wife says. "Changing the kids' names, taking my husband's name off the house, paying off our cars. Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other."

When the family asked about any kind of government protection should the Shooter's name come out, they were advised that they could go into a witness-protection-like program.

Just as soon as the Department of Defense creates one.

"They [SEAL command] told me they could get me a job driving a beer truck in Milwaukee" under an assumed identity. Like Mafia snitches, they would not be able to contact their families or friends. "We'd lose everything."

By the time the Shooter visited me that first time in April, I had come to know more of the human face of what's called Tier One Special Operations, in addition to the extraordinary skill and icy resolve. It is a privileged, consuming, and concerning look inside one of the most insular clubs on earth.

And I understood that he would face a world very different from the supportive one President Obama described at Arlington National Cemetery a few months before.

As I watched the Shooter navigate obstacles very different from the ones he faced so expertly in four war zones around the globe, I wondered: Is this how America treats its heroes? The ones President Obama called "the best of the best"? The ones Vice President Biden called "the finest warriors in the history of the world"?

******

Veterans' benefits

The Shooter retired from the U.S. Navy short before being eligible for full benefits. That doesn't mean, however, that he gets nothing. Here is a snapshot of his federal benefits package:

Pension: Because he left the service before he had served 20 years, The Shooter is not entitled to a military pension. Military pensions differ from those in the civilian world in that one does not become "vested" in the pension plan.

Medical: Every veteran who is honorably discharged from the military is entitled to five years of virtually free health care from the Veterans Administration. The families of the veterans are not.

Disability: Veterans who are injured during their service are eligible for disability benefits. The Shooter has applied for such benefits because of neck, back and eye injuries, but his claim is stuck in a 9-month backlog.